Google Explains About the Outage of Its Services Yesterday

In case you were out for shopping or for any other reason disconnected from the internet, you may not know that Gmail and several other Google services were down for almost an hour for users around the globe.

It did create panic all over Twitter and other social networking, all thinking about the reasons for the outage. Well, Google has now given an apology for the outage, and explained reasons why the services were disrupted. According to the Official Google Blog, there was a software bug that generated incorrect configurations and sent them to other services.

Here’s the technical explanation given by Google,

At 10:55 a.m. PST this morning, an internal system that generates configurations—essentially, information that tells other systems how to behave—encountered a software bug and generated an incorrect configuration. The incorrect configuration was sent to live services over the next 15 minutes, caused users’ requests for their data to be ignored, and those services, in turn, generated errors. Users began seeing these errors on affected services at 11:02 a.m., and at that time our internal monitoring alerted Google’s Site Reliability Team. Engineers were still debugging 12 minutes later when the same system, having automatically cleared the original error, generated a new correct configuration at 11:14 a.m. and began sending it; errors subsided rapidly starting at this time. By 11:30 a.m. the correct configuration was live everywhere and almost all users’ service was restored.

It did create a lot of hype all over the internet, but thankfully, the services came back to normal after 30-40 minutes. Well, we accept your apology.